t
sway we gladly confide our children. The temptations which lead your
young men astray have no hold on a youth of our happy planet. He hoards
the treasures of his heart for its coming mistress. Of her alone he
thinks, and to her all his vows are made. The thought of license would
be treasop to his sovereign lady, whose right to all the revenues of
his being he joyfully owns. To rob her, to abate her high prerogatives,
would be to impoverish, to insult, himself; for she is to be his, and
her honor, her glory, are his own. Through all this time that he dreams
of her by night and day, the exquisite reward of his devotion is the
knowledge that she is aware of him as he of her, and that in the inmost
shrine of a maiden heart his image is set up to receive the incense of
a tenderness that needs not to restrain itself through fear of possible
cross or separation.

"In due time their converging lives come together. The lovers meet,
gaze a moment into each other's eyes, then throw themselves each on
the other's breast. The maiden has all the charms that ever stirred the
blood of an Earthly lover, but there is another glamour over her which
the eyes of Earthly lovers are shut to,--the glamour of the future.
In the blushing girl her lover sees the fond and faithful wife, in the
blithe maiden the patient, pain-consecrated mother. On the virgin's
breast he beholds his children. He is prescient, even as his lips take
the first-fruits of hers, of the future years during which she is to
be his companion, his ever-present solace, his chief portion of God's
goodness. We have read some of your romances describing love as you know
it on Earth, and I must confess, my friend, we find them very dull.

"I hope," he added, as I did not at once speak, "that I shall not offend
you by saying we find them also objectionable. Your literature possesses
in general an interest for us in the picture it presents of the
curiously inverted life which the lack of foresight compels you to lead.
It is a study especially prized for the development of the imagination,
on account of the difficulty of conceiving conditions so opposed to
those of intelligent beings in general. But our women do not read your
romances. The notion that a man or woman should, ever conceive the idea
of marrying a person other than the one whose husband or wife he or she
is destined to be is profoundly shocking to our habits of thought. No
doubt you will say that such instances are ra